"Dear Ubuntu, for the last couple years life has been good. Every time I've shown you to a friend or family member, they've compared you to what they're familiar with--Windows XP or Vista, mostly--and by comparison you've looked brilliant. Yeah, your ugly brown color scheme was a bit off-putting at first, but once people saw how secure, simple, and reliable you were, the response was almost universally positive. But recently, things have changed ..."

Remote management, I guess. There is plenty of options of remote management in the Windows world, no fuss, no router configure work.

For me, I tried to access my netbook using the kde's infrastructure, utterly pointless, the performance was unbearable, in my local network.

I remember using remote desktop on Windows XP, it was as I were sitting in the remote computer.

If there is one thing that Linux will beat Windows everytime is remote management. KDE's tools mostly use VNC which is unbearable slow by anyone's standards but still a good fallback to resort when everything else fails and that happens to be multiplatform and thus will work fine on Windows, Mac, *nix. Heck, even the iPhone has a VNC client these days!

If you took the time to look further, you would notice that you can forward entire X sessions through SSH (or not) or you could also rely on NoMachine's unbelievably fast NX protocol that beats the pants off both Citrix and MS' RDP any day and that rdesktop does a fine job on the *nix as a client side. Heck... You can even use MS Remote Desktop Client with X if you install xrdp which means that you don't need to install additional software on the Windows client!

And you please don't get me started on how the lack of something like SSH makes Windows look completely retarded from a sysadmin point of view.

If you had said directory management, then sure. Windows definitely has the edge there with Active Directory going for it. But you will have a hard time trying to convince any seasoned sysadmin otherwise with that argument...